The Film Career of John Cassavetes, Part Two

Shadows(1959) won the Critic's Award at the Cannes Film Festival, the award brought him to the attention of Hollywood who financed his next movies Too Late Blues (1961) and A Child is Waiting (1963). Throughout the sixties he remained pretty much in the mainstream, including acting in several ABC dramas, Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968). His second independent film Faces (1968), starred his wife, Gena Rowlands and was nominated for three Academy Awards - Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress. Faces was typical Cassavetes - an exhausting, sincere and troubling piece, shot in an improvisational, cinema verite style. He followed Faces with Husbands (1970), a film focussing on three friends dealing with mortality and the search for freedom in the wake of a mutual friends death.

Both these movies proved pivotal in the integration of cinema verite techniques into mainstream Hollywood productions. Indeed Cassavetes mixed the two in his A Woman Under the Influence (1974) which proved to be a commercial and critical success, it was nominated for two Academy Awards - Best Actress for Rowlands and Best Director for Cassavetes.

His next two features, The Killing of A Chinese Bookie (1976) and Opening Night (1978) both failed to find audience. Cassavetes didn't give a damn, he continued doing things on his terms, he released his Gloria (1980) without a final cut. To the end Cassavetes refused to compromise, in his final work, Love Streams (1984), he captured the emptiness of his characters, who simply drift, defining themelves through incomprehensible acts of cruelty and self-destructiveness.

Russell Shortt is a travel consultant with Exploring Ireland, the leading specialists in customised, private escorted tours, escorted coach tours and independent self drive tours of Ireland. Article source Russell Shortt, http://www.exploringireland.net

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